


loved some stars in my time

by ninemoons42



Series: the princess and the pleb [1]
Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Alternate Universe - Always a Different Sex, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - No Powers, Canon Sick Character, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, First Kiss, First Time, Fluff and Smut, Friends to Lovers, Paparazzi, Porn with Feelings, Princess Noctis Stella Lucis Caelum, Rule 63, Slight Age Difference, Tutor Prompto Argentum, succession
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-08
Updated: 2018-04-08
Packaged: 2019-04-19 22:18:43
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,719
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14246916
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ninemoons42/pseuds/ninemoons42
Summary: Recovery is hard on a kingdom, and on its ailing king, and on its crown princess.But there are only a few people to whom that crown princess can show her true feelings, which makes things considerably more difficult to endure.





	loved some stars in my time

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Akumeoi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Akumeoi/gifts).



> Happy birthday, dear Voxiferous, hope you like your birthday present :)
> 
> \--- 
> 
> Musical inspiration: The Lettermen, [When I Fall In Love](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/post/172647129396/of-course-im-familiar-with-the-lovely-nat-king)

Here’s the thing they never talk about, he thinks, when they talk about being a freelancer: long long stupidly boring long hours doing fuck-all nothing, and thinking longingly about better things to do or at least a shit heap of money to do all these better things with -- or long long stupidly tiring hours doing the shit jobs no one else wants to do, for a fiendishly small amount of money, and probably way too many snide sneers on the side.

He’s tired. He’s so, so, so tired. He can feel the beginnings of the blisters on and around his ankles: and those blisters are probably the least of his aches and pains from the long day and night of work he’s just put in, but they’re the ones he’s going to have to live with for the next few days at least. 

Not for the first time, he frowns at the shape, at the idea, of the beat-up work boots he’s kicked off next to the door. Work boots! His sturdy work boots! Except that they chose, they’ve chosen, the single worst possible time to fail him: and he’d half-expected blood in his socks at the end of the long, long, long day, and it had only been a minor relief that he hadn’t found any, because -- his feet still hurt.

And what is he doing anyway, staring at his feet, so: he groans when he moves them back down into the water. Hot water, for a miracle, still staying hot somehow, in this absolute miracle of a half-tub: this deep thing that he’s actually curled himself up into, more than once, with the water lapping nearly to his throat. Hot water, and a half-tub, deep and narrow and perfect for soaking in, and he takes a breath and briefly slides beneath the surface, and the water smells of lavender and of sage, and he wraps his arms around his knees and tries to count his blessings.

But when he does, he keeps catching himself on an odd sound, on a quiet forceful sound, like the sound of a force of nature tiptoeing: click, click, and the swirl of sheer lace on the breeze, the careful delicate turn of a wrist and the firm grip of a hand, gloved, shaking his own.

Black lace, and black gloves, and shiny black pumps, and shadows beneath worn wan eyes. Blue-black irises, like storms on the move and the night sky in the immediate aftermath of a lightning strike. Silver-thread embroidery tracing thickets of delicate spiderwebbing vines onto the shoulders of a black suit jacket, with a waistcoat to match, unbuttoned, over a snow-white shirt. 

He doesn’t even have to make an effort to think of the last photograph he’d taken, today. Shoulders held straight and strong and determined. Small polite gentle smile, wavering around the edges. Sprig of blue and purple and white and yellow in a steady hand, points of hydrangea petals against perfectly worn leather. Long silver pins in a braid wound around the crown of the head, both required to anchor a long veil in place.

He rises from the water and the world fills him once again in its insistent crowding monstrous rush, and he hears the faint echoes of the nightly news: they’re replaying that clip again, he thinks, seeing that clean-scrubbed face and the lingering ghosts of unshed tears tightening that mouth into a worried line. “The doctors expect nothing less than a full recovery for my father, and as of today they have already given him a clean bill of health.” Walls upon walls of camera-lenses trained onto one slender frame, flickering in and out of sight beneath the towering waves of flashing strobes.

Forehead onto his knees: there’s no point in pretending that he hadn’t been part of that intrusive wall, that screaming chorus, that raptor-curious flock.

Photographs in exchange for a packet of money. In exchange for the blisters on his feet and the creaking in his hands: and what did he actually capture? What did he actually see? 

Who did he actually see, with him on one side of the camera, and her on the other?

He groans, quietly, and rises from the water that’s now gone tepid -- straight from the water and into a change of clothes, soft worn material that clings in odd places as he drains the tub, as he washes off the thin scum of soap-bubbles, as he runs a mop into the corners.

Beer, cold, the last one he’s got in his dinky mini-fridge, and he sits down on the edge of the bed, and glances across the room.

On the small lopsided table next to the door where he’s dropped his keys and his camera is a spot of color, blue and purple and white and yellow -- and again he can’t remember how he’d carried it away and left it intact. Can’t remember why he found it and why he picked it up. Surely she couldn’t have left any fingerprints on the stem. Surely she couldn’t have left some ghost of her touch on the petals. 

So why is he looking for her, here in this place, here in this room that’s not even large enough for his bed and his study table and his books?

Maybe he’ll work himself into a good drunken snit -- on one bottle of beer -- and he’ll pound the pillows flat and toss and turn and finally, fall asleep in the hours before another thankless and grim sunrise, hardscrabble life -- 

Buzz buzz, clarion note, and he all but bolts up from his sheets: where is his phone? Where did he leave his phone again? Why is his phone on top of the mini-fridge? Not even a glance at the screen or the name of the person who’s calling him, so frantic is the pound of his heartbeat: “Hello?”

“Hello. It’s me.”

Cold clarity: sometimes it hits him like running into ten thousand brick walls. Sometimes it taps him on the shoulder. Sometimes it opens up unexpected and hungry beneath his running feet.

And sometimes it trickles into him, gently, strangely, as it does now.

Enough clarity that he remembers to say the other name, the false name. “Stella.”

Is that a smile in that worn voice? “Yes. I seem to be -- standing here on the front steps of your apartment building.”

He blinks. “You’re here?”

“Oh. So you know nothing, too? Join the club.” Squelch, muffled sounds, and all the while he’s shooting up to his feet, he’s throwing on a jacket and he’s struggling back into his jeans, and before he can really second-guess anything he’s hurrying out the door and down eight flights of steps. 

“ -- hello? Have I lost you?”

He thumbs off the call just as he gets to the front doors and punches in his access code -- screeching annoying buzz, and black-shadowed shape on the stoop, that he pulls in and -- 

Finger, held up to him: _Wait._

Stern, small words, into her phone, muffled by the night and the cracked tiles beneath their feet, and her two-sizes-too-big hoodie, worn heathered gray: “I don’t know what’s gotten into you, bringing me here.”

“Hiding place,” is the gruff short rejoinder. 

He places the voice and remembers the tall man with his scars and his immense presence, the somber black ribbon holding his hair out of his face.

“Without even consulting the person who happens to live in this so-called hiding place?” she continues.

Glance, her eyes wearily assessing, that he meets with a half-hearted shrug.

“You should know better,” she says. “But, all right. Whatever. You’ve brought me here, the both of you, and if anything happens to me, then it’ll be on your heads and not mine. I didn’t even know where we were going until we got here.”

“We are ready to make that sacrifice.”

He matches that voice to its person, too: whipcord-built and twice as dangerous, despite of -- because of -- the impeccable dress sense and the courtly manners.

“Leave me alone,” she says, and he watches her hang up on the call without waiting for a response.

Watches her turn her phone off.

He blinks, when she peers up at him from the depths of her hoodie. “Shouldn’t you leave that on? So, so you can call them in case something happens?”

Shake of her head, that is both lost in her hoodie, and amplified by it. “They’re going to be right beneath your window anyway. All I’d have to do is shout.” Crack of a wry laugh. “And if you shout, you’ll bring the entire building down around our ears.”

“You’re cruel, _Stella_ ,” he says, and somehow he finds the strength to pout at her, to make faces, so she laughs some more: and he’s learned about the quiet and self-contained amusement of her, that’s visible in the lines radiating from the corners of her eyes.

It’s her turn to shrug, and the motion is elegant and insolent and so _her_ , so much the carefully protected and cherished and hidden part of her, that he shakes his head and smiles. 

Leads her back upstairs, sedate pace this time: he can still hear the click of her footsteps, softer now, and real, and she doesn’t say a word until he locks the door behind her and then she sighs, and toes off her boots, small and low-heeled and polished next to the dust-bunnies and the fallen heap of his backpack in the entryway.

He throws his jacket and his trousers back onto that pile, and -- back to the bed and his beer that he’s left behind on the floor -- he’s lucky he didn’t overturn the bottle when he’d run out, shocked by the sound of her voice, shocked by the presence of her in this place, and he’s halfway through a long swallow of the still-frothing drink when he turns around and -- 

He says her name, then, her real name. “Noctis.”

She’s swimming in the hoodie, is what he understands: unzipped, hanging from her shoulders and nearly all the way to her knees, and it’s the bulk of the hoodie that’s been hiding the rest of her, that maybe she’s been hiding in -- whoever would have expected the elegant Crown Princess of Insomnia to hunch around in a hoodie? No one, not even him, not even when he’s seen her huddle in this one, because she’d been working on calculus problems in the teeth of a fierce thunderstorm, the wind howling loudly enough to wake the dead.

And that’s not the only shock, that’s not the only surprise, because she pulls off the entire bulk and length of the hoodie, and she places the pile of it onto the table and smiles, and walks towards him.

His name, falling from her lips, and she makes it such a strange sound, low and compelling and sweet: “Prompto.”

“May I?” So polite of her, nothing at all like a demand, when she brushes her fingertips against his hand on the beer bottle.

“You drink this stuff?” he asks, and he gives her the bottle. How could he not? “I don’t even like it.”

“Then why drink it at all?” Reasonable, reasonable, she’s a reasonable warm weight next to him. Rustle of her skirts, rustle of material against her shoulders. The dress is a deep dark blue. High collar, long sleeves with lace cuffs that nearly overtake her hands, simple shift-shape, except for the startling sweep of the black panel arrowing up from the hems. Black that’s nearly vanished beneath a dense layer of gray beads and stitching, like writing in a language he’s only ever heard and never seen written down.

She doesn’t seem to mind the way he stares at her. Eyes gone blank and hooded as she drinks more beer, and then: “I shouldn’t finish this. It’s your beer anyway. And you look like you need it.”

He does. He takes it from her. Slosh of lukewarm beer down his throat.

And maybe it’s the rush of drinking so much in so little time that makes him ask, “What are we doing here?”

“Philosophical question, or something else? Because I don’t want to talk about school shit right now.”

“No,” he says, “I guess not,” and he lets himself fall back onto the bed. Hears the thump of her following suit. “Are you all right though? You looked like you were about to crack right down the middle, when you did that presscon.”

“Funny, I felt like I already had,” she says.

He doesn’t know what to do, hearing her: because this isn’t even the first or the tenth or even the twentieth health scare. Twenty years and more that King Regis has sat the throne of Lucis, and it’s sometimes like he never stops being frail, never stops being ailing. 

Prompto can just about remember the last time the king had looked remotely healthy, and he’d been trying to walk around in shorts then, toddling after his parents, laughing at his mother’s attempts to whistle, laughing at his father’s unsightly but tasty attempts at dinner.

That was a long time ago, he thinks, twenty years and change, and -- no, he can still vaguely remember the official photographs of King Regis and the girl at his side, when she’d only been a few months old. The girl wrapped in white lace, the girl draped in a black sash.

Noctis is nineteen, now, and her father has been ailing all her life, and Prompto doesn’t know what to do, seeing the sweet stoicism of her facade from earlier, seeing the hard line of her mouth now.

So he doesn’t really think when he says, “How can I help?”

She goes rigid next to him.

He sits up, startled, and looks down at her.

Looks down at the deep and terrible lines in her face, the fear and the useless rage and the sorrow of her. The weariness is gone and in its place is, is something far worse than resignation. Something worse than mourning, because maybe she’s gone past all those stages of grief and ended up here, with him, with the ghosts of lessons in mathematics and physics still lingering in the corners, and her eyes gone blank and blind.

She says, “If I tell you a state secret, will you keep it? Will you hide it and never even breathe a word of it?”

And she’s so quiet, in the asking.

So quiet he thinks she might be afraid of him.

He takes her hand: and he’s never done this before, never let himself reach out to her before. He exchanges fist-bumps and high-fives and shoulder-slaps with all of the other students he helps, but he’s never reached out to her, not even when she made all the same mistakes, not even when she was almost crying with frustration, and that reserve between them evaporates, in the here and now. His hand around her chilled fingers, her trembling knuckles.

“Do you need to tell it?” he asks. “If you do, if you really do, I’ll keep it and I’ll never even think of it.”

He watches her turn away from him.

Watches her mouth form the words.

“It wasn’t the first time the, the religious people came. Three nights ago, they came to the palace. They gave my father last rites. Nothing new about that, you understand. Seems like every year something like this happens. Three nights ago, though.” 

He says nothing about the break in her voice.

“Three nights ago I actually sat down with my staff, my people, Gladiolus and Ignis, you know who they are -- three nights ago we all sat down in my offices and we had a very sober discussion about, about planning a royal funeral. About planning a coronation. My coronation.

“We do that every few years, you know. Everyone from the Prime Minister on down. We review, and we update, and then we close the folders for another year and try not to think about it.

“Three nights ago we went back for the folders and I wondered, I really really wondered, if this time we were going to open them because we were going to execute for real.”

That close.

That close.

He can’t think of it. He can’t measure it, or understand it -- and she can, she has, she’s already been there and done that, and his heart goes out to her, again. 

He says, “I’ll keep your secret.”

“Thank you.”

He lies back down, and he lets go of her hand -- he winces, when he hears the lonely little sound that she makes in response -- and he turns onto his side.

Carefully takes her into his arms.

She doesn’t respond, not at first.

If she bats him away, that will be all right; if she gets up and walks away, that will be all right. 

If she turns away and never comes back -- then that’s the price he’ll gladly pay, for this. Scant offer of scant comfort. He has literally nothing else to offer her anyway: so he’ll simply offer her his silence, and this moment of contact.

“Why?” he barely hears her ask.

“Should have done this sooner,” is all he has to say. “You maybe might have needed this sooner.”

Maybe that’s his name, or maybe her father’s, or maybe it’s not even a name: but she makes a sound, and then she turns in his arms and she’s clutching at him, at his shirt. She’s catching his skin in her nails and he bears it quietly for her sake, as she heaves and shakes and doesn’t cry.

One hand in her hair, stroking, trying for soothing; the other arm holding her tightly.

He lets her break. Lets her shake. Lets her tears soak silently into his shirt.

When she goes quiet and still at last, he keeps holding on to her -- he only rolls onto his back, and he can’t close his eyes, can’t go to sleep, not with that awful weight she’s shared with him.

What will it mean for her, to wear those massive black robes, to wear that massive golden crown? He knows about the structures of the Lucian government, knows the articles and the amendments and all the mess and the unholy wars fought over the constitution, even knows some of the local politicians because he’s taken their photographs for some magazine or another.

But those things probably mean one thing to him, and another thing, or another set of things entirely, to the person he’s holding on to, and -- he doesn’t know where to even start, if he wants to try and understand what she’s thinking right now. If he wants to try and understand what she had been thinking, three days ago.

He lets his mind wander: in the abstract, he knows about succession. Succession after the death of the previous ruler, and succession after an abdication -- those are supposed to be peaceful things. The other kinds are more frightening: succession in war, succession after overthrow, succession after assassination, and probably a few others that he can’t bear to name. 

But succession is only just the bare bones of: a ruler leaves the throne and another takes his or her place.

He holds Noctis, and doesn’t want to think of her as heir to the throne, although that’s part of her, and as likely take it from her as cut off a limb, as cut off her nose.

Only human. 

Like her father is only human, frail and bent and capable and still the unchallenged leader of Lucis.

And Noctis? What does he know of her? What does he know from hours of sitting next to her, listening to her grumble and talk her way through formulas and values and graphs and word problems of fiendishly stupid complexity? What does he know from hours of watching her peer at her smartphone, switching from King’s Knight to Fish Flurry to an unabridged translation of one of the first Lucian novels? What does he know from the way she does her makeup?

He can still vividly remember every moment of that: cleansing wipes in a rose-gold foil packet. Cotton pads pre-soaked with toner. Moisturizer, the exact same drugstore brand as his, but she mixes hers with precisely four drops of one of the most expensive foundations on the market. White eyeliner in pencil form, feather-short strokes just at the corners of her eyes, then blue-gray eyeliner in liquid form, and her hands steady with the exaggerated wing-lines. Sweep of mascara, golden flecks in black; soft dots of peach blusher on her cheeks; and the navy-blue lipstick that might as well be her signature.

And she’d frowned at him, after all her makeup was set and done, and apologized for cutting the tutoring session short, and given him an extra-generous tip besides, before running off to some last-minute diplomatic dinner.

Making up for the sudden absence of her father.

He holds her even more closely, in the here and now, and she stirs in his arms and looks up. “Prompto.”

“Noctis,” he says, and tries to smile at her. 

She deserves real smiles, he thinks. Not perfect smiles. He doesn’t even know what a perfect smile is. Just a smile, just him, and what he really feels.

Maybe he’s showing his feelings in his eyes, and maybe she’ll help him out and tell him what he looks like -- but no, she doesn’t owe him anything. Not even that. 

She asks him anyway: “Why? Why are you smiling at me?”

And he doesn’t get to answer, because she’s moving and she’s shifting and she’s smiling back at him -- crooked and soft and only a brief glimpse because she’s blurring out, she’s coming closer, she’s -- 

She’s kissing him.

And he leans into the kiss, without thinking; he leans back, too, and that draws her in closer. He keeps holding her gently. He lets her set the pace, and he nips at her, too, and he doesn’t know what he’s doing and maybe she does, and he pulls away only to tell her: “I, this is embarrassing but I don’t know how to do this. How to kiss you properly. How to, I have no idea where you want to go with this. But, Noctis, can I tell you? I’m right here and I want this, I want whatever you want.”

She kisses him again in response. “Then I really need you to do one thing for me.”

“Yeah.”

“The moment I do something you don’t like, you tell me so we can stop. Non-negotiable, okay? I need you to tell me.”

“Gotcha,” he says, and he dares to pull her down into the next kiss.

That she takes over, to his relief and to his wonder, to the nerves in him sparking alight, to the need that spears through him and makes him gasp into her mouth.

She’s grinning when she pulls away, grinning and proud and fiercely alive in his arms, and yet she’s still holding him so gently, so sweetly, her hands framing his face, warm warm warm. “You’re picking this up quickly.”

“I like my instructor,” he says, and she laughs right in his face, and he laughs back, and again he initiates the kiss -- but this time he meets her breath for labored breath, stroke for shivering stroke, and she’s breathless, too, when she pulls away, when she kisses the tip of his nose and sits up.

He sits up with her, and she’s moving so insistently in his lap that he knows he’s suddenly blushing. “You’re doing that on purpose,” he says, and he has to gasp at the end of it.

No response but the rustle of her dress, the decisive movement of her hands, as she squirms up onto her knees and -- one fell swoop, and she sits again.

Helplessly he traces out the shape of her, the straps of the black bra and the band of her briefs, and he makes his hands go still on her waist -- but she smiles and shimmies closer, and he groans and laughs at the same time, closing his eyes because if he doesn’t he’ll drown in her, he’ll be lost in her for good -- 

“You really haven’t done this before,” she whispers, gently, and he chases the movement of her mouth with a needy kiss. 

“Sorry,” he says, completely without thinking.

“What for?”

“I don’t know,” he says.

He expects her to laugh at him, he expects her to make fun of him, and she doesn’t: because she says, “Open your eyes.”

When had he closed them?

Sweet soft look in her eyes. 

And her words: “Be with me. Just -- be with me.”

So he says, “Teach me how.”

Slow slow dawning smile on her mouth. “Oh. Okay. Finally something I can be your tutor for.”

He laughs, and laughs, even when she leans forward and -- she overbalances them both on purpose, and he falls back into the bed, her body pressed so good and so insistent against him -- and all the more so when she pins him with her gaze, when she catches him with the intensity of her look, and rolls --

He’s looking down into the bright stars and galaxies in her eyes, the luminous strength of her, the power of her resolve, and -- he can be brave, in the face of that. He can dare, in the face of Noctis looking at him.

He learns how to kiss her -- kisses that tease and kisses that stagger and kisses that bruise. Rough kisses, tender kisses, fervent and devoted and avid and powerful. He tastes her breath and lets her drink his in, lets her drink all of him in.

He learns how to touch her -- all the sensitive and vulnerable and ticklish places of her. Eyes wide, mouth dripping sweetly encouraging words, laughing and shivering all in the exact same breaths. Her temples, her ears, the curve of her throat and the hollow between her collar bones. The hard peaks and the tender under-curves of her breasts. The stretch of her skin over her ribs, leading to the elegant curve of her waist. Faint traces of scars in the small of her back, almost neatly mirrored by the stretch marks striping her stomach. Thigh, the back of her knee, the bridge and then the arch of her foot, and the outer side of the sole. 

He learns how to love her, how to make her sigh and how to make her cling, how to make her curse him with passionate need. He lingers between her legs until she shakes herself apart over and over again. Up and down, the frenzied cycles of her, the ache of her, that finally leaves her silent and wanting and breathless -- words of welcome falling from her lips.

“Please, please, please” -- he learns how to appreciate that word, that one word spiraling into incoherence and the clench of hands on his shoulders, nails digging into him. The weight of her legs around his waist, cross-locked at the ankles, pulling him closer, pulling them together.

The first time he spins out of his mind, drunk on the multitude of her sensations, he blesses and curses her name with grateful greed.

The second time, it’s with her laughter ringing in his ears, and the knowledge that she’s going to leave one hell of a bruise, where she’d accidentally kicked him in the ribs as she’d climbed on top of him.

The third time he’s breathless and utterly silent, and the world’s narrowed down to nothing but Noctis, Noctis, Noctis: slow ride, sweetest torture, the beautiful breathtaking shock of her.

He drifts, after, grateful and glad, and he can feel how Noctis’s fingertips are tracing patterns and lines into his skin, as though she were creating pictures out of his freckles, out of his own spots and scars -- he just can’t see her, and he’s only thinking about pulling her closer. 

He doesn’t have any words for the thoughts churning in his mind, or the feelings that wind his heart in thorns, in roots.

So he kisses the top of Noctis’s head, instead, and he doesn’t think about -- blisters or flowers or golden crowns. Doesn’t think about folders, or hoodies, or bottles of beer. 

He doesn’t think about tomorrow.

**Author's Note:**

> Come talk to me on Tumblr at my FFXV sideblog [@ninemoons42-lestallumhaven](http://ninemoons42-lestallumhaven.tumblr.com/) or at my main [@ninemoons42](http://ninemoons42.tumblr.com/)!


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